Musée Toulouse-Lautrec

When Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec died in 1901, worn out at 36, the Paris art world was unsure what to do with the hundreds of works left in his studio. His mother, Countess Adèle, offered them to his birthplace, the cathedral town of Albi in southern France, and the town housed them in the Palais de la Berbie, a fortress-like former bishops' palace with metre-thick walls beside the river.

The result is the largest collection of his work anywhere, more than a thousand pieces. You can follow him from early horse studies to the posters and paintings of Montmartre that made his name, the dancers, the singer Aristide Bruant in his red scarf, and the women of the Paris cabarets and brothels drawn without flattery or judgement.

The old palace keeps its formal terraced gardens above the Tarn, laid out long before the paintings arrived.